


Society Affair

by high_life



Category: Red Dead Redemption (Video Games)
Genre: Back Alley Blow Job, M/M, Saint Denis, top hat white tie and tails
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-18
Updated: 2019-03-18
Packaged: 2019-11-23 15:41:43
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,811
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18153806
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/high_life/pseuds/high_life
Summary: He knows this is exactly what it will be; a back alley affair, with stubble grazing his lips and gloved hands reaching into places and enough darkness to shroud him, to shroud them from wandering eyes that were often unkind to people of their persuasion. Josiah thinks he shouldn’t care in his forty years on this earth fast approaching - that he’d had enough affairs to know where, when and what to do to lower the veil just enough in secrecy. But it was never simple. Maybe for a few years in Paris it had been. But Saint Denis was far from the liberal highs of French society.





	Society Affair

Josiah hisses out a breath, lets white-gloved hands clasp the man’s arm with a feverish look around the cool, damp evening in Saint Denis.

There’s a certain kind of atmosphere that hangs in the air here; couples stroll along the ornate gardens, boots splashing lightly in puddles left from the storm that had pushed through the night sky. He can hear the revels still from inside the decorative hotel they had just slipped out of - voices raise with dim laughter and glasses clinking and all matters of polite, high society and on any other night, he’d still be right in the middle of it all.

But there were other, more _pressing_ things that held his attention now.

Like the man dressed in white tie and tails, almost a perfect mirror of himself. With the added bonus of a kind of _smirk_ that sent Josiah’s skin prickling in heated anticipation.

“Not _here_ — “ he whispers sharply, splays his fingers in such a way on the man’s arm as if to tell him yes, oh _yes_ he wants this very much so but Josiah is, above all, a distinctly  _private_ person about town.

Especially when it came to matters such as this.

The man tips his head. Angles champagne licked lips towards him.

“Then _where_ ,” he drawls lazily. Josiah can see the way he _delights_ in getting under his skin so easily.

In his own alcoholic buzz — though nothing close to the glasses his companion had guzzled down, light sparkling in his eyes that had begun Josiah’s descent into thick, bubbling want — he thinks, searches his mind, scans over the intricate layout of the winding back alleys of Saint Denis.

And he knows this is exactly what it will be; a back alley affair, with stubble grazing his lips and gloved hands reaching into places and enough darkness to shroud him, to shroud _them_ from wandering eyes that were often unkind to people of their persuasion. Josiah thinks he shouldn’t care in his forty years on this earth fast approaching - that he’d had enough affairs to know where, when and what to do to lower the veil just enough in secrecy. But it was never simple. Maybe for a few years in Paris it had been. But Saint Denis was _far_ from the liberal highs of French society.

“Come — “ he says then, folds his fingers into a grasp and pulls on his arm. Puts them in some kind of quick, brisk walk that anybody passing by would never mistake for anything more than two, well dressed gentlemen on their way to the next round of poker in another lounge. Josiah is thankful for the wide brim of his top hat that hides the heat already flushed in his cheeks.

As much as he tries though, he can never control _everything_.

Especially the unpredictable nature of people other than himself.

Two, three blocks down the street that quietens with every pace taken away from the brimming hotel and Josiah feels a prickle on his neck, like a sigh whispered on his skin.

He bristles.

“ _What if I just dropped to my knees now,”_ comes the man’s voice next to him, almost a little too close for what someone would consider correct, decent behaviour. His voice is gruff, with an edge that sends more heat pushing through Josiah’s body than he feels comfortable with. It _teases_ him.

“Don’t,” he warns but even he can hear the break in his own voice. The way it wavers under a practiced, poised accent.

His companion knows him a little _too_ well.

There’s a self-satisfied kind of chuckle under the man’s breath then and suddenly Josiah feels like he’s being _pulled_ instead of him doing the _pulling_ , and with sharp steps he’s wheeled around and placed firmly against a wet, trickling brick wall.

 _Ah, the aforementioned alleyway_. He muses to himself. Feels he should be agitated, annoyed or maybe even _surprised_.

But he never is.

Not with him.

His mouth is claimed deliriously then with rough, chapped lips that know exactly where to go and what drives him _mad_ and sends his own hands tugging sharply at fine fabric. Josiah knows he’s a tall, imposing kind of man that has more strength than most people think on first glance, but he always feels like _paper_ under Arthur’s grip. There’s nothing he could do in his quaint, Victorian upbringing that would bring him close to the kind of power the outlaw wields from years of a hard, suffering kind of existence.

And yet maybe that’s what had drawn him in to begin with.

There’s a growl below Arthur’s voice, thick in his throat and he can taste the champagne, the tickling bubbles and sharp tang underneath his tongue. Maybe it’s the hours they spent trying to delicately rob a party full of too-rich men while posing amongst them that truly sends beads of desire gathering on Josiah’s skin — the innate _game_ of it all, the fact that he can draw Arthur away from camp so innocently as if none of this, the _thing_ that they find themselves tangled in, could possibly exist in anybody else’s reality.

And Josiah likes that _perfectly_.

Just as he predicted he feels hands slip to his waistcoat, tug at the fabric, attempt to wrangle buttons out of their clasps. He’s desperate now in ways that he had denied himself on the street, as if they’re not just in an alleyway that’s a little too close to the hotel, to signs of life. Josiah finds himself not caring; like being around the outlaw made him forget his place in the world and so eager to throw caution into the wind.

And Arthur moves with such a rough, unforgiving air that it sucks the breath straight out of Josiah’s lungs.

When he does, in fact, drop to his knees — and Josiah tries to push the nagging thought of the expensive suit he’d just bought the man that morning, now dirtied in the wet cobblestone — there’s no preamble, no usual cast of his eyes upwards like he usually does in their little _dalliances_ like this. Because Arthur knows the look that had been dancing behind his gaze all night; knows the magician better than he knows himself. Knows when green eyes darken under lowered brows. That the job had really just been an _excuse_.

Josiah bites down on a gloved knuckle when a hot mouth envelopes him.

It’s like a _potion_ to his senses; a concoction brewed so perfectly that he finds himself drinking more, wanting more, _needing_ more with every taste on his tongue.

And the outlaw willingly gives it.

“Sly, weren’t ya — “ he says between sloppy, _dirty_ pops that are positively sinful to both Josiah’s ears and eyes. “ — though you always seem to _think_ you are — “

There’s a chuckle at the back of Arthur’s throat and it rumbles against Josiah’s tightening head and he can’t help it, then, because the knuckles against his teeth do _nothing_ to quiet the groan that rattles through him.

“ _Really_ ,” he says in some kind of attempt to exert control over his body — and rather his _mind_ — again. As if his words should’ve been, _we both know what game was being played, dear friend_.

“Oh, you don’t surprise me any more than _usual_ Josiah.”

He thinks it’s strange for a moment that Arthur suddenly doesn’t seem as champagne drunk as he had him pinned for, but the thought is quickly gone with a swipe of a rough, wide tongue against his gland and then Josiah is positively _shameless_ ; hands reach out to lace through Arthur’s hair and push him down further and the outlaw is letting him, relenting as he pulses himself into his mouth.

That’s how it always seemed to go with them. Josiah doesn’t find himself lasting very long when the rougher man was so insistent on having him right there and then, with eyes eager and mouth so wet, warm and _tight_ around him. On the rare occurrences when they had time on their hands, Josiah would fancy himself in control and the one drawing out the begging, _rather_ than the one writhing around in pleasure against a brick wall in downtown Saint Denis and expensive suit marked beyond repair.

But he _relishes_ in it all the same.

Josiah comes with bottom lip sucked sharply between teeth and fingers hard against Arthur’s scalp and he knows he should open his eyes, if only to catch the glimpse of his _spend_ decorating the other man’s lips before being spat unceremoniously onto the wet ground.

There’s a moment where he simply lets himself pant, then. With breath slowly, surely returning to his lungs like he can breathe above water again instead of paddling like crazy. He’s dimly aware of fingers pocketing him back into his trousers. Like the way he’d seen him reload his pistol countless times; practiced, plain, second nature.

Buttons him back up.

Pulls himself off his knees.

“Well,” Arthur starts. And his voice is low, raspy enough for Josiah to creak his eyes open again and catch the satisfied kind of look on his face.

“ _Quite_ ,” he fills in.

Because things were often better left unsaid between the two of them.

The outlaw is chuckling again, sparkling his eyes before looking away with a kind of shake of his head that Josiah knows is a special mannerism of his; one that says, _Jesus, I don’t know what I’m doing but I’m enjoying it all the same_.

“Think we should go back, then?” Arthur doesn’t make any more moves towards him and Josiah is halfway between thankful — a little over stimulated honestly — and maybe even a small, tiny bit regretful. He watches instead as he reaches for a packet of cigarettes from his pocket and deftly lights a match against the cool brick, smoke puffing once lit.

Another familiar mannerism with so much lingering behind it. Arthur never was a man of many words.

Josiah pulls himself together, rearranges his coat, straightens his white bow tie. Dusts down one knee, then the other.

Casts his green eyes across to the blonde man.

There’s words on the tip of his tongue, a clever quip about pockets to be picked or minds to be manipulated and warped. But Josiah finds, with the smoke of Arthur’s cigarette lilting across the darkness of the evening, something almost catching his breath.

Propelling him forward to place a hand again on the outlaw’s arm.

A gaze flickers back.

“ _Josiah_ ,” it was Arthur’s turn to say warningly.

And he knows the tone as well as it had spilled from his own lips; that things should be kept simple, uncomplicated. That saying too much only lent more meaning to actions that both had agreed upon.

So he removes his hand. Rolls his shoulders with a glance away. Extends a gloved hand towards the brighter street.

“Shall we?”


End file.
